“Most people use Skype these days, or have other applications running on their desktop, and so it was felt that for those that want to use voice, it would be only a minor inconvenience,” Ireman told Hypergrid Business. “Once set up it is available easily enough.”

“It also provides file transfer services, ideal if you want to pass someone a great texture or a file that cannot be transferred in world,” he added. “The voice server is hosted on our servers, and voice chat is encrypted, and so is under our control.”

TeamSpeak also offers other benefits that the free Vivox service does not, he said, such as higher quality voice, voice chat available without having to be logged into the grid, unlimited multiple channels for groups or private voice chats, as well as channels for each region.

Vivox co-founder and CTO Jim Toga responded by saying that Vivox offers many similar features.

“Vivox has always offered unlimited channels — and participants — in both 3D audio and 2D group audio along with private conversations,” Toga told Hypergrid Business. “As far as using Vivox communications when not connected to an OpenSim grid — it’s entirely possible, but we don’t supply a full client application that does this. If someone wanted to create one using the viewer logic as a basis, we would certainly encourage it. The avatar credentials used to log in to Vivox are authenticated by Vivox servers and do not require a simulator involvement to participate in voice.”

Open source voice

Open source options include FreeSwitch and Whisper/Mumble. Like TeamSpeak, both of these options require that grid owners host their own voice servers.

Some OpenSim users, like government agencies, prefer this because they want all communications to stay on their own servers.

“We plan to migrate from Mumble to FreeSwitch in the very near future,” said Douglas Maxwell, the science and technology manager for virtual world strategic applications at the U.S. Army’s Simulation & Training Technology Center, which runs the MOSES grid.

Mumble is a higher-quality voice solution than FreeSwitch, with better audio and spacial support, but requires customized viewers. In addition, only Windows clients are currently available.

Douglas Maxwell

“There are a significant number of the MOSES users who are academics, and therefore also use the Mac platform,” Maxwell told Hypergrid Business. “Since the Department of Defense officially uses the Windows platform and my mandate is to research soldier training, I cannot justify the expenditure to perform the coding a Mac client would require to support Mumble.”

Part of his mandate for the MOSES grid is to create an environment that can operate on an isolated computer system, or on a secure network, completely separate from the Internet.

“This requirement prevents us from using the Vivox service,” he said.

When the grid was first deployed, FreeSwitch was not an option due to firewall rules, but a new firewall appliance has since been installed that offers more configuration control and allows FreeSwitch to work, he said.

“Recently, I took a look at the number of support requests for Mac and voice support and the volume of request simply could not be ignored,” he said. “Hopefully this solution will allow the Mac — and Linux — users to fully utilize all of the MOSES capabilities. It should also allow broader participation in the weekly office hours as well as the experimental scalability events.”

The Virtual Worlds Grid also uses FreeSwitch, according to founder Myron Curtis. The entire grid, and the voice server, runs on two home PCs with quad core processors, he said.

“FreeSwitch runs on the region server box from the C: drive,” he told Hypergrid Business. “It is a low cost system but quite effective, and seldom has much lag.”

Maria Korolov is editor and publisher of Hypergrid Business. She has been a journalist for more than twenty years and has worked for the Chicago Tribune, Reuters, and Computerworld and has reported from over a dozen countries, including Russia and China.

Jack

Have you checked out Razer Comms?

Justin Ireman

I think most would agree, that Vivox is the simplest solution for in world voice, but after I received the new updated Vivox terms and conditions a few weeks ago, I immediately saw this problem coming.

Vivox have every right to charge for their services, but at present they do not offer a small commercial licence, and I didn’t want to run the risk of falling foul of the legally binding contract agreement, and possible potential legal action in the future. With all due respect to Vivox, I think it is good to have alternatives.

I cancelled my agreement with Vivox after not receiving a reply from them after enquiring about small commercial terms , may be my email got missed, but I now use TeamSpeak, and it is very easy to set up, and a commercial licence for a year is no more than the average grid is charging for a full region a month. By the way, I don’t work for TeamSpeak or have any association with them other than being a customer lol.

feralkat

I as well sent in an email requesting information for a commercial license and they simply didn’t reply to me. This left me with a disappointed feeling. I am currently also looking for alternatives as if I was going to pay for something I’d want good customer support or at least a simple reply to my e-mail. I have a friend who is a asterisk developer and he told me that he could easily implement a nice stable solution but it would cost me a few thousand bucks. He was even showing me how we could have it to where avatars could get voicemails when they are offline kind of like the optional add on service in SL so this could be interesting.

Justin Ireman

that sounds pretty cool. TeamSpeak do have a SDK product, so it would be possible to have it intergrated, but I don’t have the resources or skills to do that.

Not sure what Vivox is up to, not responding to emails.

Nebadon

I Think Moses grid is going to find that freeswitch is a terrible choice, it does not support spatial audio, there is no ability to tell who is actually speaking, you can not mute anyone, anyone expecting Freeswitch to be a suitable alternative to Vivox is going to be pretty disappointed i suspect, I do not expect that to go well at all. and while skype and teamspeak are certainly options, it complicates matters for people who have never used them before and requires them to create yet another account, i suspect not everyone will be willing to do that.

hack13

I have to agree with you neb, also mumble can work cross platform just we got to find a developer willing to do it.

Justin Ireman

Well just to correct something, I have never used Freeswitch or Mumble, but with TeamSpeak you don’t have to create any accounts whatsoever, you just download the software, then stick our voice server URL in the connection box. On the first install it creates unique ID which is what it uses to be recognised by the server. So no accounts need to be created whatsoever, all you use is a nickname, which you can change anytime you want.

hack13

TeamSpeak however has some pretty strange license agreements you have to fallow though. To me honestly could seem more of a headache for grid owners.

feralkat

I agree with you on this as well… Their licensing is a bit complicated.

feralkat

TeamSpeak is real nice and it would be cool if there is some way to have it implemented.

David King

I expect that, if Whisper/Mumble did get serious development, Vivox would be motivated to be more responsive to smaller users.